Written for Karaokegal's "Come As You're Not" fanfic costume party. It's a little bit crack, it's a little bit meta, and it's a lot of long-lost daughter. And while he's mentioned, Wilson isn't actually present in the story. Hopefully, it's different enough from what I normally write to be a better costume than the real-life one I'm wearing now...
The first thing Gregory House saw when he woke from his latest coma was a pair of bright blue eyes staring down at him. They were a shade somewhere between azure and cobalt, not that House actually knew what either of those shades was. He was a heterosexual man after all, those drunken nights with Wilson and fantasies about Chase notwithstanding.
The eyes, whatever the shade, were uncomfortably close to his own face, not out of close concern or monitoring, but because their owner was approximately 4'9".
"When did Cuddy start hiring midgets as doctors?" he asked, wondering why his throat wasn't dryer. The last few times he'd woken from a coma it had been like swallowing ball bearings wrapped in sandpaper. "Does she think she can pay them half the salary if they're only half the size?"
"I'm not a midget," the mouth below the eyes replied. "I just haven't hit my growth spurt yet. Though I'm hoping it won't be until after the London Olympics. I wouldn't want it to hamper my chance of winning the all-around gold medal in artistic gymnastics. My coach wanted to falsify my passport so I could compete in Beijing, but I said, no, let the others have their chance for glory. And really, studying for my bar exam and my medical boards at the same time was enough to keep me busy."
House groaned and wondered what drugs he was on. This was one of his weirder hallucinations. "Who are you and what are you doing in my subconscious?"
"I wouldn't be caught dead in your subconscious," the mouth replied. "That place is scripted by Stephen King on crack."
The mouth was nearly as disconcerting as the eyes, so House decided to concentrate on a different feature. The nose was unremarkable, so it was a safe place to focus for the time being. "Then do us both a favour and get out."
"Is that any way to talk to the person who saved your life?"
The nose backed away, giving House a full view of the face. It was framed with tightly curled brown hair, and seemed somehow familiar. He could see now that the face topped a body garbed in surgical scrubs. He hadn't known they came in sizes for prepubescent gymnasts. "When did Cuddy start hiring children as doctors?" he asked, correcting his earlier question. "Is she paying you out of the day care fund?"
The mouth smirked and House felt a strong sense of deja vu. "I did it pro bono. Anything for family."
House wondered how long he'd been in a coma this time. It had to be some time before 2012, so Cuddy hadn't had time to spawn and raise a mini-doctor. And while he'd never kept in close touch with his parents, he was fairly certain he'd have heard about a younger sister at some point in the last decade. "Who are you?" he repeated. "Did one of Aunt Sarah's daughters sneak off to Switzerland to go to 'boarding school'? I hate it when the family keeps me out of the scandal loop."
"The loop begins and ends with you, Pop. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to break it to you that bluntly. I wanted to get to know you first and then tell you the truth, but you keep almost dying, so it's probably best I got it over with quickly, in case the next time sticks."
It was definitely a hallucination, House decided. "You're saying you're my daughter?"
"What gave it away? Calling you 'Pop'? Wow, you really are a genius."
The mouth was definitely annoying, which lent credence to her claim. "I suppose you have more than an overactive imagination and a strong sense of wish fulfillment to prove that you're my daughter," he said.
"A birth certificate with your name on the father line to start. But everyone lies, even my mother, so I ran a DNA test while you were in a coma. Congratulations, Dr. House. You have a bouncing baby girl."
The bouncing baby girl was neither bouncing nor a baby, but House had to admit that it was a girl. One out of three was better than his fellows usually managed, so maybe genetics were involved. He sat up carefully, glad to finally be looking down on his hallucination. "What's your name? Or should I just call you Daughter?"
"Grier House. And before you ask and strain your brain trying to do the calculations, what were you doing on New Year's Eve 1994, Daddy-O?" She smirked. "Or better yet, who?"
"Whom," House corrected automatically. He wondered if there were some dormant grammar gene that went active with parenthood. "That was pre-Stacy, so the possibilities are endless. The only thing I remember is a perfect mix of alcohol and uppers. But I could have sworn I went home with Wilson that night." He peered at her, looking for sculpted cheekbones, a lazy eye, and a wide streak of self-righteousness.
Grier rolled her eyes, only strengthening his suspicions and vague fear. "Wilson isn't my father. Or mother. Don't you think you would have noticed if your male best friend gave birth?"
"He did do that extra fellowship at Penn around that time, which I always thought was overkill. After all, it's not like Cuddy cares if he's actually qualified as a paediatric, surgical, and radiation oncologist." But Wilson had always had an annoying habit of trying to do things by the book.
"My mother's name was Marie Suzanne Rivage. She was a beautiful French-Canadian doctor who was spending the night at the Lawrenceville Howard Johnson when she wandered into a private party and met a man with bright blue eyes and a scathing wit. They spent fifteen amazing minutes together in a linen closet on the fifth floor, and the next morning she flew out to Bangladesh with Médecins sans Frontières. She mistook her pregnancy for symptoms of a gastrointestinal complaint. By the time she got the diagnosis right, it was too late for an abortion. I was born between shifts in a field hospital and was helping out in Maman's clinic by the time I could walk. It was far better training than I ever got at Harvard."
House closed his eyes and tried to block out the sound of her voice by playing "The Dark Side of the Moon" in his head. But he was forced to listen again while he turned the record over, and realized to his horror that she was still reciting her medical accomplishments.
"...but it was after I synthesized a new antibiotic and single-handedly stopped an outbreak of bacterial meningitis that I was recruited by the Mayo Clinic to run the antimicrobial resistance division. That's where I was when Dr. Cuddy told me that you'd slipped into a mysterious coma and that I was your only hope."
House supposed it only made sense that the last resort for the doctor of last resort would be his daughter. Inheritance had to count for something in medical miracles. "So what was the diagnosis?" He assumed his trained monkeys had ruled out the usual causes -- overdoses, electrocution, experimental anaesthetics, seizures.
"Coleridge syndrome," Grier replied. "Caused by an inability to willingly suspend disbelief. You started questioning too many improbabilities -- Chase's sudden ability to perform any medical or quasi-medical procedure required; the lack of qualified lab technicians in a major hospital; your ability to survive a skull fracture, heart attack, and seizure without lingering effects. An inconsistency here or there is easily reconcilable, but when you tried to make sense of the entire timeline, your neural pathways broke down and set up a feedback loop that eventually shorted out your brain. One minute you were smoking opium in your office, the next you were screaming about an albatross. When your fellows found you, you were unresponsive, staring blankly ahead, but your mouth was moving. Fortunately, Chase took a lip-reading course back in Melbourne, so he identified that you were reciting 'Kubla Khan' over and over. When I heard the symptoms, Coleridge syndrome was the obvious diagnosis."
"But that's incurable," House said, mentally scanning the entry in his well-thumbed copy of Diagnoses for the Final Five Minutes, Volume 2. "I should be stacked in the basement with the other vegetables. What did you do?"
"First, I cleared Xanadu from your TiVo. And thank you for teaching me how it feels to be completely embarrassed by a parent. Maman has exquisite taste."
"That was Wilson's fault," House protested. "He programmed Gene Kelly in the last time he crashed on the couch. I knew his love of movie musicals would be the end of me some day."
"Right." Grier looked sceptical and disapproving. House had always thought that was the prerogative of the parent. "And I suppose he left the poster autographed by Olivia Newton John rolled up in the back of your closet."
"He's sneaky that way." He leaned forward and grabbed her arm. "You didn't burn it, did you?"
"It was the only way," she said, though she didn't sound remorseful at all. "And even that didn't work. So we had to resort to extreme measures and bring in the Person from Porlock. Clive Downs. He's a butcher." She pointed to a smiling, round-faced man standing just outside the door. "He started talking about cuts of meat and you snapped right out of it. We had to sedate you to keep you from threatening to carve out his vocal chords."
Clive Downs waved and held up a meat pie. Two orderlies -- the first House had seen for episodes -- led him away before House could ask for a piece. He was starving. An IV diet just didn't cut it.
"How can we prevent a relapse?" House asked, turning his attention to longer-term problems. It wasn't as if life at Princeton Plainsboro was getting any more plausible. Sooner or later he'd be driven to question the contradictions again.
"I'm the litmus test," Grier replied. "If you can accept me, you can accept any inconsistency or outright absurdity." She winked broadly. "Think about it. Nothing is impossible. A threesome with Cuddy and Cameron. A threesome with Wilson and Chase. Maybe the muscle in your thigh will magically regenerate in season seven. Just sit back and enjoy."
House could do that. He had an endless supply of medical mysteries to solve. There was no need to seek out deeper questions of existence and continuity. He glanced at his watch. Almost time for Prescription: Passion. "How do you feel about soap operas?" he asked Grier.
She grinned and pulled up a chair. "I live for them."